Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Taming The Wild West: The Time Is Near For Congress To Intervene In Name, Image, And Likeness Deals For Collegiate Athletes, Bradley Kilborn Kilborn

Belmont Law Review

This note proposes a multifaceted approach for congressional intervention in the NIL market. While there are many areas needing NIL regulation in the collegiate athletic market, the most critical area of need for NIL regulation involves the collectives and directives. These entities have formed and operated without any meaningful guardrails since the NCAA permitted student-athletes to be compensated for their NIL. Additionally, they have been able to influence recruiting both at the high school recruit level and in the collegiate athlete transfer portal.

Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan

Belmont Law Review

A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature …

The Conclusions Of Sccr 44, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright and related Rights (SCCR) held its 44th meeting where substantial progress was made in protecting public interest issues within the two major standing items of the agenda -- on the Broadcast Treaty and on Limitations and Exceptions. This document summarizes the decisions made at the meeting as recorded in the Chair’s Summary.

Excerpts Of Sccr 44 Delegate Statements, Sean Flynn, Andres Izquierdo

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) held its 44th meeting November 6-8, 2023. This post includes excerpts from the public statements made by country or regional delegations during the meeting.

Navigating Risk In Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis Of Elsevier's Sciencedirect, Becky Yoose, Nick Shockey

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary

As libraries transitioned from buying materials to licensing content, serious threats to privacy followed. This change shifted more control over library user data (and whether it is collected or kept at all) from the local library to third-party vendors, including personal data about what people search for and what they read. This transition has further reinforced the move by some of the largest academic publishers to move beyond content and become data analytics businesses that provide platforms of tools used throughout the research lifecycle that can collect user data at each stage. These companies have an increasing incentive …

Cancelling Dr. Seuss, Cathay Y.N. Smith

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced in March 2021 that it would no longer license or publish six of its children’s books because those books portrayed people in racist or culturally stereotypical ways. Since then, the public has learned through news reports and social media that other publishers have similarly reviewed and altered their catalogues of classic children’s works, including withdrawing them from the public, editing them to remove problematic content, or adding disclaimers to warn the public about racially insensitive or outdated content. The public reaction to Dr. Seuss’s decision and these other actions has been largely divided. Some criticized these …

Report To The U. S. Congress On Financing Mechanisms For Open Access Publishing Of Federally Funded Research, White House Office Of Science And Technology Policy

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) submits this report to the Appropriations Committees of the Senate and the House in fulfillment of the requirement in the Committee Report accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 (P.L. 117-328) for financing mechanisms for open access publishing of federally funded research.1 According to that Report, “The Committee recognizes the considerable progress made by OSTP” and “encourages OSTP to continue its efforts to coordinate the implementation of public access policies across Federal departments and agencies and to identify additional opportunities to enhance access to the results of Federally funded …

The Constitutional Court Of Colombia Imposes Limits On The Use Of Internet Jammers During Social Protests, Carolina Botero, Lina Paola Velásquez

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

The Constitutional Court of Colombia has issued an important ruling regarding the use of the Internet as the main tool to guarantee the fundamental rights to freedom of speech and access to information during social protests. This ruling marks an important precedent in the matter because it imposed new obligations on the State and the government to guarantee the "maximum level of information". Likewise, the Court ordered the regulation of the use of signal jammers during social protests. This article will analyze the ruling and its effects in Colombia.

Historic Tensions Involving International Intellectual Property Protection Of Medical Technology With Disastrous Public Health Consequences, Srividhya Ragavan, Swaraj Paul Barooah

Faculty Scholarship

Historic tensions have pervaded the alliance of intellectual property's ill-fated accord with trade. The intersections of the alliance have impacted access to medical technologies resulting in plaguing public health with disastrous consequences in select parts of the globe, the first of which was perhaps most notably seen during the HIV-AIDS crisis at the turn of the century. At this time, WTO’s sacrosanct norms from the accord between trade and intellectual property rights essentially force African countries to choose between international trade sanctions, and saving thousands of lives by allowing exceptions to patent rights. While much has been written about global …

Special Challenges In Execution Of Arbitral Awards In Public Private Partnerships, Srividhya Ragavan, Niraj Kumar Seth

Faculty Scholarship

With around 47 million pending cases at various stages of Indian judiciary and one of the lowest levels of judges per million of population in the world, India’s arbitration regime presents a ray of hope for millions of Indians who face the prospect of justice being denied to them due to inordinate delays caused by a clogged judicial pipeline. The enactment of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 was presented as a viable alternative to resolve commercial disputes in a timely manner. This paper uses a case study to discuss how arbitration in India has not fulfilled the timeliness promise …

To Mint Or Not To Mint: Non-Fungible Tokens And The Right Of Publicity, Hannah Bobek

Fordham Law Review

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) allow for authentication and ownership of digital assets, which are notable features in the virtual world given the infiniteness of internet content. The emergence of this novel technology, however, has raised challenges, especially regarding enforcement of the right of publicity. This Note addresses how litigators have approached right of publicity violations arising from NFTs and how courts might respond to future violations that this technology is capable of facilitating. Legal scholars and commentators argue that certain features of NFTs pose pronounced threats to the right of publicity, namely the technology’s novelty, democratized nature, anonymization of creators, transferability …

Copyright's Lost Art Of Substantial Similarity, Sandra M. Aistars

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Three copyright doctrines focus more than any others on the contributions of authors to visual artworks: originality, substantial similarity, and fair use. Questions regarding the aesthetics of works of authorship filter into judicial determinations under each of these doctrines. This Article comments on a trend among courts hearing visual arts cases to de-emphasize substantial similarity analyses and shift infringement determinations almost entirely to the fair use defense.

The trend has troubling procedural fairness consequences. Without a full evidentiary record about the artworks they encounter in infringement cases, courts’ ability to properly evaluate whether the use of appropriated material in a …

Measuring Follow-On Innovation, Janet Freilich, Sepehr Shahshahani

Faculty Scholarship

How patents affect follow-on innovation is a key question for the patent system. We disaggregate follow-on innovation into activities that infringe patents and others that do not infringe but can be indirectly affected by patents. Replicating an important study using our disaggregated measure, we find that 87 percent of follow-on scientific publications describing patented genes do not constitute patent infringement. Supplementing our empirical strategy with data on patent expiration dates, we find that gene patents which are not close to expiration cause an increase in noninfringing follow-on research, but the effect disappears for patents close to expiration. Our nuanced measure …

Executive Order On The Safe, Secure, And Trustworthy Development And Use Of Artificial Intelligence, Joseph R. Biden

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Section 1. Purpose. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril. Responsible AI use has the potential to help solve urgent challenges while making our world more prosperous, productive, innovative, and secure. At the same time, irresponsible use could exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation; displace and disempower workers; stifle competition; and pose risks to national security. Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

My Administration places the highest urgency …

Infrostructure(S): Administering Information, Kali Murray

Buffalo Law Review

This Article, Infrostructure(s): Administering Information, considers how authoritative entities generate, manage, and produce informational structures, facilities, and architectures that support market creation and creative economy decision-making between private parties and entities. The term infrostructure, as opposed to other terms, such as infostructure and infosphere, suggests that infrostructures play vital roles in modern democratic life including producing new information resources, facilitating private transactions between private parties, and building the administrative state.

This Article is divided into two parts. Part I discusses how information regulation is mediated through information forms and information systems with a focus on the materialities of information forms …

Copyright And Generative Ai: Insights From The Project On The Right To Research, Sean M. Fiil-Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

With the widespread launch of “generative AI” technology capable of creating music, art and text that could potentially substitute for the work of human creators, policy makers around the world are highly focused on how and whether copyright law should change in response. This paper summarizes results from studies that have been commissioned as part of the Project on the Right to Research in International Copyright coordinated by American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. That project focuses on uses of copyrighted works in text and data mining technology by scientific researchers. The same text and data mining …

The Economics Of Medical Patents And The U.S. Government’S Role In Drug Price Negotiations, Eddie Halwani

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (AELJ) Blog

The U.S. government’s recent but unusual push to negotiate drug prices has struck a chord with many Americans, with polls showing a significant, bipartisan majority favoring the action.This action presents an opportunity to appreciate medical patents’ role in spurring innovation forward. Amid changing policies, medical patents shape the accessibility and affordability of care through their impact on drug pricing. Drug prices in the United States are notably high—about 2.4 times those in other developed countries.

This post was originally published on the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal website on October 24, 2023. The original post can be accessed via …

Signs Of Life: The Current State Of Generative Content And Copyright Protection, Ryan Bickett

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (AELJ) Blog

With the recent rise in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and its broadening use by the public, questions have arisen regarding the applicability of copyright law over both the content it sources and creates. While the answers remain unclear as this technology rapidly updates, there have been recent legal developments which will shape how we deal with this content.

This post was originally published on the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal website on October 24, 2023. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above.

Developing A Human Right To Research In International Law, Sanya Samtani

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

The covid-19 pandemic has highlighted issues concerning equitable access to and participation in research. But research has always been indispensable to human development. To what extent does international law guarantee access to research as well as the practice of researching? Drawing on the social anthropology definition of research as the pursuit of that which is not yet known, this paper locates a novel human right to research within the core international human rights covenants. The paper sets out the scope and content of the right and the nature and content of State obligations flowing from it. It concludes by outlining …

Integrating Nist And Iso Cybersecurity Audit And Risk Assessment Frameworks Into Cameroonian Law, Bernard Ngalim

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper reviews cybersecurity laws and regulations in Cameroon, focusing on cybersecurity and information security audits and risk assessments. The importance of cybersecurity risk assessment and the implementation of security controls to cure deficiencies noted during risk assessments or audits is a critical step in developing cybersecurity resilience. Cameroon's cybersecurity legal framework provides for audits but does not explicitly enumerate controls. Consequently, integrating relevant controls from the NIST frameworks and ISO Standards can improve the cybersecurity posture in Cameroon while waiting for a comprehensive revision of the legal framework. NIST and ISO are internationally recognized as best practices in information …